A gap in your site visibility during an emergency means people are left behind. In Australia, the WHS Act 2011 mandates that PCBUs ensure the safety of all workers, including subcontractors. In the United States, OSHA standards require employers to maintain a safe workplace for all personnel. Relying on a principal contractor’s word is not a safety strategy; it is a liability.
Your duty of care does not end at the principal contractor
Across our work with Australian and US organisations, we’ve found that the legal obligation to maintain a safe site rests with the site owner or PCBU regardless of the contracting chain. In Australia, the WHS Act 2011 requires PCBUs to manage risks for all persons on site. In the US, OSHA requires employers to ensure subcontractors are not exposed to recognised hazards.
Paper logs are lists of arrivals, not lists of survivors
Most organisations trust the principal contractor to manage their own crews, leaving the site owner with a dangerous blind spot. A paper log only records who arrived, not who is actually still inside when the alarm sounds.
- Principal contractors frequently rotate crews, meaning the people on site today may not be the ones approved last week.
- Manual sign-in sheets fail to capture the specific induction status of individual subcontractors.
- Disconnected spreadsheets cannot provide a real-time site occupancy report during an evacuation.
- A lack of check-out tracking leads to ghost entries, inflating your muster point verification list and delaying emergency services.
Digital visibility converts chaos into compliance
A cloud-based visitor management system ensures every subcontractor is accounted for individually. By integrating contractor induction and check-in, you verify safety credentials before access is granted.
- Require all subcontractor staff to complete a digital contractor induction—including licence verification and site rule acknowledgement—before site access.
- Implement a digital visitor management system to facilitate individual contractor induction and check-in upon arrival.
- Mandate that subcontractors unfamiliar with the site are escorted by a supervisor to ensure they follow established protocols.
- Utilise real-time site occupancy reports to monitor exactly who is on site and the total hours spent on location.
- Generate a real-time muster roll call during emergencies to cross-reference who checked in against who is accounted for.
Time and People: Visitor Management That Works When It Has To
We convert complex compliance obligations into working infrastructure through cloud-connected visitor management and real-time evacuation reporting. In our experience, the ability to report exactly how long a contractor spends on site is critical for both operational records and safety. For over 12 years across Australia and the United States, we have focused on ensuring that when the alarm sounds, every single person is accounted for.
Content prepared by Time and People — visitor and contractor management across Australia and the United States.